LECTURE BY BENJAMIN PEDERSEN: “EMOTIONS AND EXEMPLARITY: THE SHAPING OF HISTORICAL WRITING IN THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD”

Benjamin Pedersen has been Carlsberg Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute since 2024 on a project which aims to re-evaluate historical writing in the Hellenistic period through the lens of the intellectual achievements of Aristotle and his followers.

In this lecture, Benjamin discusses the importance of emotions in historical writing in the Hellenistic period. As the best surviving historian from the Hellenistic period, Polybios (c. 200–118 BCE) has given a unique expression of the political moment when the Greeks lost their independence to the Roman Empire. His work also provides an important perspective on the understanding of emotions in the late Hellenistic period. By pointing to examples from Polybios’ discussion of the Second Punic War (Book 3), the Roman constitution (Book 6), and his concept of universal history, the first part of the lecture explores how Polybios was able to portray emotions as both rational and moral. The second part of the lecture takes its cue from a passage in Polybios (Book 10) to examine how Hellenistic biographers employed many of the same forms and techniques as historiographers, such as narrative structure, moral analysis, and appeals to the emotions of the audience. As Polybios insisted on the power of didactic learning, i.e., that moral understanding grows from reflecting on the successes and failures of others, these biographical narratives were also profoundly didactic, which suggests that historiography and biography were linked by a shared a moral programme..

On the picture we see Scipio Aemilianus og Polybios at Carthage as imagined by Jacob Buys, 1797.